FullReads

When we came round by the statue of Achilles and on to the Ride, I shortened my reins, and got a better hold of the whip, while I found that, from some cause I cannot explain, the roof of my mouth grew uncomfortably dry.

‘I should be glad of a little quiet talk with you, if you’ve no objection,’ I began.

‘I am quite at your disposal,’ he said, champing his bit with a touch of irony.

‘First, let me tell you,’ I said, ‘that I have lost my only love for ever.’

‘Well,’ he retorted flippantly, ‘you won’t die of it. So have I. We must endeavour to console one another!’

I still maintained a deadly calm. ‘You seem unaware that you are the sole cause of my calamity,’ I said. ‘Had you only consented to face Wild Rose yesterday, I should have been a happy man by this time!’

‘How was I to know that, when you let me think all your affections were given to the elderly thing who is trotted out by my friend the grey?’

‘We won’t argue, please,’ I said hastily. ‘It is enough that your infernal egotism and self-will have ruined my happiness. I have allowed you to usurp the rule, to reverse our natural positions. I shall do so no more. I intend to teach you a lesson you will never forget.’

For a horse, he certainly had a keen sense of humour. I thought the girths would have snapped.

‘And when do you intend to begin?’ he asked, as soon as he could speak.

I looked in front of me: there were Diana and her accepted lover riding towards us; and so natural is dissimulation, even to the sweetest and best women, that no one would have suspected from her radiant face that her gaiety covered an aching heart.

‘I intend to begin now,’ I said. ‘Monster, demon, whatever you are that have held me in thrall so long, I have broken my chains! I have been a coward long enough. You may kill me if you like. I rather hope you will; but first I mean to pay you back some of the humiliation with which you have loaded me. I intend to thrash you as long as I remain in the saddle.’

I have been told by eye-witnesses that the chastisement was of brief duration, but while it lasted, I flatter myself, it was severe. I laid into him with a stout whip, of whose effectiveness I had assured myself by experiments upon my own legs. I dug my borrowed spurs into his flanks. I jerked his mouth. I dare say he was almost as much surprised as pained. But he was pained!

I was about to continue my practical rebuke, when my victim suddenly evaded my grasp; and for one vivid second I seemed to be gazing upon a birdseye view of his back; and then there was a crash, and I lay, buzzing like a bee, in an iridescent fog, and each colour meant a different pain, and they faded at last into darkness, and I remember no more.

‘It was weeks,’ concluded Mr. Pulvertoft, ‘before that darkness lifted and revealed me to myself as a strapped and bandaged invalid. But–and this is perhaps the most curious part of my narrative–almost the first sounds that reached my ears were those of wedding bells; and I knew, without requiring to be told, that they were ringing for Diana’s marriage with the Colonel. That showed there wasn’t much the matter with me, didn’t it? Why, I can hear them everywhere now. I don’t think she ought to have had them rung at Sandown though: it was just a little ostentatious, so long after the ceremony; don’t you think so?’

‘Yes–yes,’ I said; ‘but you never told me what became of the horse.’

‘Ah! the horse–yes. I am looking for him. I’m not so angry with him as I was, and I don’t like to ask too many questions at the stables, for fear they may tell me one day that they had to shoot him while I was so ill. You knew I was ill, I dare say?’ he broke off: ‘there were bulletins about me in the papers. Look here.’

He handed me a cutting on which I read:

‘THE RECENT ACCIDENT IN ROTTEN ROW.–There is no change as yet in Mr. Pulvertoft’s condition. The unfortunate gentleman is still lying unconscious at his rooms in Park Street; and his medical attendants fear that, even if he recovers his physical strength, the brain will be permanently injured.’

‘But that was all nonsense!’ said Mr. Pulvertoft, with a little nervous laugh, ‘it wasn’t injured a bit, or how could I remember everything so clearly as I do, you know?’

And this was an argument that was, of course, unanswerable.